From stealth to a $500 million valuation: Former Microsoft engineers raise $70 million to challenge data giants
Edelbyte raised a $25 million Seed round led by Sequoia Capital, followed by a $45 million Series A led by Quiet Capital, with participation from Greenoaks and Swish Ventures. The company says it is already serving Fortune 500 customers with a platform designed to challenge established data infrastructure players such as Snowflake and Databricks.
Edelbyte, a data infrastructure company founded by four former Microsoft engineers, has raised $45 million in a Series A funding round led by Quiet Capital. The round included participation from all existing investors, as well as new backers including Gil Ofer's QP Ventures, Startpoint Capital and Cerca Partners.
The company previously raised a $25 million Seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from Greenoaks and Swish Ventures, the venture capital fund founded by former NBA player Omri Casspi. The latest financing values Edelbyte at $500 million.
Edelbyte was founded in November 2025 by Avner Aharoni (CEO), Evgeney Ryzhyk (CTO), Alexander Sloutsky (VP of Engineering) and Yoni Leibowitz (VP of Platform Engineering). The four founders each have approximately 20 years of experience at Microsoft and spent more than a decade working together on large-scale data systems. Ryzhyk and Sloutsky were part of the original team behind Kusto, a data platform that began as an internal Microsoft project and later became the foundation for products including Azure Data Explorer. Aharoni and Leibowitz subsequently joined the team, helping develop technology that supports data processing across Microsoft's products and services.
After more than a decade working together, the four decided to leave Microsoft and establish Edelbyte. The company currently employs approximately 40 people across Israel, Europe and the United States, with offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. It says it is already operating petabyte-scale systems for Fortune 500 companies and other global organizations, including customers in information security, automotive manufacturing and financial services.
Edelbyte has developed a data platform designed to handle massive volumes of information and the increasingly complex query workloads associated with the AI era. The company is positioning itself against established data infrastructure providers such as Snowflake, Databricks and ClickHouse, targeting a market it estimates at $300 billion. Its platform combines traditional analytics, text search, spatial queries and AI-driven workloads on a single infrastructure. This is intended to eliminate the need for organizations to maintain separate systems for different applications or replicate data across multiple platforms, reducing operational complexity and infrastructure costs.
The platform can be deployed across public and private cloud environments as well as on-premises infrastructure, with both managed and self-hosted options. This flexibility is intended to allow organizations to search and analyze data regardless of where it is stored.
According to the company, its architecture can significantly compress raw data, reducing the amount of information that needs to be stored and processed for each query. Edelbyte says its platform can return results in milliseconds and handle thousands of concurrent queries, including those involving large volumes of historical data. The platform also indexes all available data, allowing users to run ad hoc queries that were not defined in advance. This differs from systems that rely on preconfigured indexes designed for specific dashboards, reports or recurring alerts.
"The systems that companies rely on to search and analyze their data were built for a world before AI," said Avner Aharoni, co-founder and CEO of Edelbyte. "As it becomes central to how businesses operate, the volume and complexity of data queries will grow far beyond what legacy infrastructure was designed to handle. We believe this creates an opportunity to build a new market leader in search and analytics, with AI at its core from day one. Our ambition is to make Edelbyte the platform that powers this next generation of applications, and the progress we've made in our first year gives us confidence in the scale of that opportunity."
